↵Introduction

This seminar explains how budgeting connects with strategy, costing, and performance measurement in modern organizations. It provides practical knowledge of how budgets are created, controlled, and analyzed, and how financial decisions support overall business performance and strategic goals.

Objectives 

• Link finance and operation for budgeting purposes and strategy execution
• Learn how to build a comprehensive performance measurement system
• Master traditional techniques and recent best practices
• Develop an understanding of the corporate budgeting process
• Be able to interpret the financial impact of strategic directions
• Understand the problems of overheads allocation and how Activity-Based Analysis may aid decision-making and pricing strategies

Target Audience

• Finance Managers
• Budgeting & Planning Officers
• Accountants & Financial Analysts
• Cost Controllers
• Business & Operations Managers
• Project & Department Heads
• Professionals involved in financial decision-making
• Anyone responsible for budgeting or performance reporting

Outlines 

Day 1: Strategic and Financial Planning

• Financial vs. managerial accounting
• Exploring the linkages between strategy, budgeting, costing and performance measurement
• Understanding what strategic planning is and why it is important
• Mission; Vision; Strategy; Goals and Objectives
• The outside environment and the internal context: SWOT and PESTEL analysis
• What is happening in your company
• Looking for the drivers of value creation
• Examples and cases

Day 2: The Framework for Budgeting

• What is a budget - why create a budget?
• The budgeting framework
• Various types of budgets
• The budgeting process and the human side of budgeting
• Sales forecasting and budgeting schedules
• What is the budgeting process in your company?
• Top-down vs. bottom-up budget; incremental vs. zero-based
• Examples of budgetary schedules

Day 3: Cost Analysis for Budgeting

• What is costing? Defining costs
• Cost behavior – Fixed and variable
• Breakeven models - The Equation Method
• The contribution margin concept
• Direct and indirect costs
• Traditional vs. Activity Based Costing
• Product vs. period costs
• Case study and examples

Day 4: Budgeting: case study day - Controlling the budget variances

• What is the situation in your organization?
• Is budgeting organized by department and/or projects?
• Budget variance analysis
• Describe the difference between a static budget and a flexible budget
• Compute flexible-budget variances and sales-volume variances
• Explain why standard costs are often used in variance analysis
• Integrate continuous improvement into variance analysis
• Case study, examples and exercises

Day 5: Beyond Budgeting: Broadening Performance Measurement Systems

• Advantages and disadvantages of budgeting
• How to improve budgeting in your organization
• What next? Beyond the Budget…
• The Balanced Scorecard: linking Strategy to budgeting to Performance Measurement
• Financial perspective, Customer perspective
• Internal Business Process perspective, Learning and growth perspective
• Developing and adapting the scorecard
• Case study illustration